When Detroit: Become Human was originally released for Playstation 4 three years ago it had a more consistently warm reception than previous Quantic Dream games had. I’ve heard a lot of claims about this being their best game yet and while this isn’t much of an achievement, to be honest, I was still intrigued. Now that I’ve played it on PC, I have to say that I almost liked it. But the more I played it and the more I think about it now after I’m done with the game, the less I like it. Even if it may really be their best yet.
If you’re already familiar with recent titles from Quantic Dream, starting with Fahrenheit, you’d know how Detroit plays out. It’s a story-driven adventure game with heavy focus on weird right stick movements for interactions and QTEs for most actions. After the disastrously bad UI change in Beyond: Two Souls, the controls were returned to how they used to work in Heavy Rain, but on top of that a lot of additional quality of life improvements were added. The best one is unquestionably the pause button, similar to the one you’d see in BioWare’s titles, where with the press of a button you freeze the action during the exploration bits to see your current objectives, all spots that can be interacted with and additionally you can rotate the camera to any position that feels comfortable.
Additionally, Quantic Dream now fully embraced the idea of flowcharts to show exactly how many different variations of the scenes there are to motivate people replaying the game or scenes in order to get different results. While far more “gamey” than what something like “will remember that” does, it also fits their games far better, as they often feel closer to what you would see in Visual Novels with multiple paths, rather than games where you’re meant to live with your choices like titles from Telltale or Life is Strange. In fact, in general, apart from usual annoyances here and there, this indeed feels like Quantic Dream finally accepting that they’re making games and, as such, need to follow the rules of game design and make gaming experience comfortable, rather than extremely awkward.
Their storytelling ability has also improved. It hasn’t exactly become good, at least not yet, but this time they are trying to tell a story that flows like a story, where scenes are parts of the story not random scenarios, and where characters feel consistent throughout the playthrough. You get 3 playable characters this time, with their overall dynamic being basically a copy of what we got in Fahrenheit – a cop, a fugitive messiah, a simpler character whose fate is determined by the choices of the first two and who helps with worldbuilding. It works well a lot of the time and the characters are quite likeable, if predictable. And even one of the “big twists” in the story, which is obvious since almost the very beginning of the game, is handled more like a revelation to the character, rather than to players. Though, they still clearly expect players to gasp in shock and not roll their eyes, and they fail at that. But it is mostly well done, well delivered and enjoyable.
Yet it wouldn’t be a Quantic Dream game without them constantly shooting themselves in the foot. Some of the scenes are still there just because, for whatever reason, they want to have a tired trope situation in their story that plays out exactly as you’d expect it to and it makes no sense when you try to analyze it. The game is still too long for its own good, especially now that they clearly wish people to replay it and get that flowchart filled in, something that I might’ve considered if the game was twice as short, but have no desire to do with how painfully long it gets. They still have no clue how to handle the awesome concepts and ideas they have and pretty much everything that starts out as a cool idea becomes stupid by the end. And their attempts at exploring themes and being symbolic are still as smart as calling a political villain in your story Rudolph Heetler and thinking that you’re being subtle.
On top of that, if you would still wish to experience the game, the PC port isn’t the version I would suggest going with. I can only guess that the engine changes between their titles made for PS3 and this game made for PS4 were too extensive and complex, since the ports of Heavy Rain and Beyond work really well, while Detroit is a horrible mess of a port. It’s performance is extremely uneven, with all background tasks on PC becoming almost unresponsive, it has a really slow shader compilation process on the first boot (repeated after every GPU driver update, of course), it occasionally crashes and it has a weird issue with how it detects the controller every time you start the game, refusing to interact with objects (despite the right stick working for camera) until you click all inputs a few times. It does look good, but it’s not worth this compromised experience.
Should you go for the experience at all, however? It’s a difficult thing to answer definitively. If you are outright allergic to all of the dumb that Quantic Dream games have since their very first project, Detroit won’t become the first game to break this cycle. If you were keen on what the studio did before and don’t mind cliche storytelling and QTEs, you might want to check the game out, just preferably not on PC. If you loved their previous games, well, you’ve probably played this already. I was pleasantly surprised by the improvements in this game in comparison to their previous attempts and maybe, just maybe, someday they will make something that is actually good. But they would probably need to first ask David Cage to stop writing their scripts.